China Airlines (華航) may consider an equity tie-up with a Chinese carrier because of record fuel prices and the easing of a 59-year-long restriction on flights across the Taiwan Strait.
“It’ll be an option in the future,” CAL chairman Ringo Chao (趙國帥) said on Sunday in an interview in Guangzhou, China, adding that no talks are under way at present. “Surging fuel costs are making life difficult for all airlines.”
Chinese and Taiwanese airlines have begun forming ties as they prepare to start limited weekend services across the Strait next month.
PHOTO: EPA
Chao is in Guangzhou to sign a deal with China Southern Airlines Co (中國南方航空), the People’s Republic of China (PRC) biggest carrier, to cooperate in areas including maintenance and catering.
“They have their eyes on daily flights in the future, when competition will intensify,” said Charles Ma, an analyst at SinoPac Securities Co (建華證券) in Taipei, who has a “trading buy” rating on China Airlines.
“With alliances, they won’t engage in malicious competition and will be able to maintain ticket prices,” he said.
CAL is banking on the start of cross-strait services to help it post a profit this year, Chao said. The airline’s loss widened to NT$2.97 billion (US$97.7 million) in the first quarter from NT$2.43 billion a year earlier, weighed down by jet-fuel prices that have almost doubled in a year.
The airline is cutting about 10 percent of its flights and has raised surcharges in a bid to return to profit.
Still, it has no plans to cancel plane orders, Chao said.
EVA Airways Corp (長榮航空) will cancel about 5 percent of its passenger services from Sept. 1 to Dec. 1, spokeswoman Katherine Ko said on June 9.
Airlines will begin nonstop services between China and Taiwan on July 4. Taiwanese carriers will be able to make 18 round trips a week, as will Chinese airlines.
Cross-strait services could eventually account for as much as half as CAL’s profit if the market is fully liberalized, he added.
CAL and China Southern signed a cooperation accord yesterday.
Air China Ltd (中國國際航空) and China Eastern Airlines Corp (中國東航), the PRC’s second and third biggest carriers, have also said they want to cooperate with Taiwanese airlines.
CAL and its Mandarin Airlines (華信航空) unit will start passenger services to Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Xiamen next month. The two carriers will offer a total of 29 round trips across the Strait next month, CAL said last Thursday.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained